The good people over at ars technica are reporting a rather neat (or horribly awful, depending on your view) team-up between Amazon and Tivo. Soon you’ll be able to buy those product placements from your favorite TV shows without even doing an amazon search. I could see this going one of two ways: TiVo customers (and impulse buyers) will love it OR it will be the most annoying piece of integrated technology since Microsoft gave us “clippy” the ever-so-annoying paper clip ‘helper’.

In other, non-related news, the times online is reporting the Webocalypse. Ok, ok, so it’s not really the end of the web, but it’s a start. Basically google has to give up 12 TB of YouTube user data to Viacom. Somehow Viacom thinks this will stop people from posting clips and shows on YouTube. It won’t. It will, however, give them more information than any possible ‘focus group’ could ever get on the viewing habits of young people. I’m assuming I don’t even need to mention the privacy issues this action brings up. Also The European Parliament added a law so each member state’s authorities could determine what software is appropriate for use on the internet. The article itself is a tad alarmist, but there are some very good points. I’m wondering how this might influence those of us across the pond.

Tags: General Tech Info by jakob
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One of the difficulties found in running a shared hosting environment, or even a dedicated hosting area, is finding out who is using resources and why. Apache running Suexec or some variant thereof can let you know who owns the scripts that are pounding the box. MySQL process are a bit more difficult to analyze. MyTop is definitely an essential tool for seeing who is pounding it RIGHT NOW, but isn’t as accurate or at least helpful in finding routine abusers. Luckily MySQL provides for the logging of slow queries. This is their story.
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Tags: Databases, Linux, tutorials by Jay Ward
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This weeks PowerShell tutorial covers how to create pipelines and output management. Powershell pipelines are a series of cmdlets that pass objects from one to another. Each cmdlet generates an object and passes it to the next cmdlet via the pipeline. The receiving cmdlet uses that object as input and generates its own object as output. Connecting pipelines is done by using the pipe character (|).

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Tags: General Tech Info, PowerShell, Programming, tutorials by BrettW
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Last week, we started making the web interaction class and did the self-signed compatibility functions as well as some setup ones. You can see all that here. Today we get into the meat and potatoes and get started on the functions that will actually send and receive the data we care about. So here we go!
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Tags: .NET C#, Internet, Programming, tutorials by Jay Ward
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Net Neutrality is a pretty basic concept – keep the net open, and unrestricted to any content. Google does a pretty nice job of summing this up a little more in depth: “Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days… Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet.”

Late last week, the Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin seemed to share this thought by “moving to prohibit ComCast from throttling BitTorrent traffic”. In fact, he is also wanting to reprimand ComCast for choking down on the BitTorrent protocol – a blow that would leave any NN enthusiast pretty happy. Not so fast, though: the rest of the FCC still needs to decide, which could still take a few weeks. This is definitely something to pay attention to.

Tags: Internet by jakob
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